You may be familiar with the term eating psychology, nutritional psychology or psychonutrition. But what do they mean? Can you lose weight another way?
First of all, it is important that you know the objective of this discipline. It is a specialty of psychology that is responsible for study the relationships between emotions, thoughts, behavior and food And yes, knowing and working in these areas will make you lose weight and above all, it will help you keep it off.
Furthermore, more and more studies demonstrate the relationship between mental health well-being and a balanced diet, both in macro and micronutrients. A topic of great importance when learning what you need to eat to feel good and be able to maintain weight loss in the long term.
Something essential when losing weight is reducing stress
When we feel stress, our sympathetic nervous system, which helps us fight or flee in dangerous situations, is our survival system. It is a great system, useful if you are being chased by a lion or are in the jungle without food, it is made to activate for a few minutes, perhaps a few hours and then return to normal, giving way to the parasimatic nervous system. The current reality is that the problems of the 21st century last longer and activate this system for a long time, producing unwanted effects on our body.
If you are in the office and you have a project delivered, you will neither physically fight nor flee, leaving all that energy inside you. If you restrict certain types of foods because you’re on a diet, your brain won’t know if you’re on a diet. loss without food in the jungle or you are trying to lose weight and your sympathetic nervous system will be activated again.
How does this affect you besides having more stress?
When this system is activated for a long time, we find certain side effects that really affect us when it comes to relating to food:
- Cortisol and insulin rise in the blood
- Our organs become inflamed
- Our intestinal flora is weakened
- It decreases oxygen in the blood and thus slows down the metabolism, accumulating energy in the form of fat.
Furthermore, since the parasympathetic nervous system is “off”, decreases our ability to feel pleasure and to solve it we eat food faster and less consciously. As if that were not enough, the foods that the body “wants” (not those it needs) are those with the highest glucose content. This attempt to stabilize the amount of insulin-glucose in the blood seems wise, but the reality is that the body plays tricks on us. Finally, the result is a glucose spike that in a few hours will cause us greater stress and the need for foods with a high sugar content.
As you can see, it is a chain that needs to be controlled so that your weight loss is more effective and prolonged.
Counting calories, having prohibitions on certain foods or a very restrictive diet are other factors that also cause more stress. When we use these weight loss strategies the results are not always positive, since there is a high rate of abandonment, a deep feeling of failure and frustration, discouragement and of course more stress Therefore, if you work in psychonutrition you will stop counting calories and having prohibitions.
In weight loss therapy we will focus on you learning to listen to your body. This is essential if you leave other more stressful methods behind. It’s about getting to know you, your story, your relationship with food throughout your life, learning to eat in a healthy and balanced way giving the body what it really needs. As? Knowing your body more and better to get the most out of it.
